Child weaning practices among nursing mothers in Suhum municipality

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to investigate Child Weaning Practices among Nursing Mothers in Suhum Municipality in the Eastern Region of Ghana. In line with the aim of the study, the objectives were to find out weaning foods mothers in Suhum give to their infants after 6 - 24 months, identify factors that influence the choice of weaning foods in Suhum, find out how mothers feed their infants with weaning foods and to find out mothers challenges during the weaning period, using the descriptive research design. Purposive and convenience sampling techniques were used to sample a total of sixty nine (69) respondents. Structured interview guide data gathering tools was used to document the findings. The instrument was pilot tested at the Kibi Government hospital in the Eastern Region of Ghana. The instrument was validated by two of my colleagues and my supervisor. After that it was pretested using five mothers, the Cronbach alpha yielded 0.732, showing reliability of the instrument. The University of Education,Winneba http://ir.uew.edu.gh xii Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 20 was used for the analysis. Statistics included mean, frequencies, percentages and standard deviations. Based on the research questions, the frequency tables were used to make summaries of respondents‘ responses and for drawing conclusions. The study revealed that weaning foods mothers in Suhum give to their infants are locally prepared dishes that the whole family eats. During feeding, these foods are mashed with fingers before given to them. It was also discovered that the factors that influence mothers‘ choice are availability and acceptability of food. Some challenges were that infants refuse to eat, cry, vomit, experience diarrhoea, and sometimes allergy. It was recommended that mothers should prepare weaning foods separately to meet the standard of infants and feed them 5 – 6 times in a day, also select weaning foods based on acceptability of the child.